Chris

Airwindows is one guy: me! I am an audio hacker and computer programmer from way back. I seek only to continue my life up here in Vermont, inventing things and putting them onto the internet, sometimes for free and sometimes for pay. My hope is that people richer than me (i.e. most people) don't rob me. My other hope is for another cup of Aeropress. One out of two ain't bad!

While I was coding plugins in 2011, I attempted something ahead of its time. Specifically, it was ahead of the time that I SHOULD have tried it. It was a set of drumkits that I’d sampled.

This was miked with Studio Projects SDCs which I’d modded, through API mic pres, into the guts of an old 20-bit ADAT which I had rewired so intensely that the API’s transformer outputs ran through 1/4″ TRS jacks, and heavy(ish) point to point wire, directly to the balanced inputs of the converter chips themselves. Considering how small this circuitry was, it was an amazing feat of hacky ingenuity to wire the ADAT this way, and it let me do multi-miked drum kit recording.

It also picked up a bit of digital noise from inside the ADAT, which is a problem I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. (I’m using an old Apogee Rosetta now, not hacking apart ADATs to try and make them tolerable…)

The kick mic was various things including an Audix D6. The drums themselves were everything from Gretsch to Ludwig Acrolite to Slingerland, typically not that fancy. Cymbals mostly Zildjian.